This Sunday we’ll be taking a look at the sharp rise in painkiller use in America and in Colorado, the medical evolution that’s behind it, and how the medical community is now working to keep pills in the right hands.

The numbers from every source are stark. Here’s one that wouldn’t even fit into the story, from a CDC report chock full of startling statistics[1]: “By 2010, enough (opioid pain relievers) were sold to medicate every American adult with a typical dose of 5 mg of hydrocodone every 4 hours for 1 month.”

Doctors want the public to know they still back the evolution in pain care, which has brought relief to millions of people whose chronic pain used to be ignored. But they also have fascinating observations about how people feel pain differently, and handle it in a wide variety of ways.

“Somewhere in society, the idea came up of never feeling bad,” one doctor said. “I think our ancestors lived with pain all the time, and never talked about it.”

And here’s a statistic not so flattering to the physician community, that public health investigators and enforcement agencies will want to keep in mind: “Given that 3% of physicians accounted for 62% of the OPR prescribed in one study, the proliferation of high-volume prescribers can have a large impact on state use of OPR and overdose death rates.”